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Sixties activist Carl Oglesby dies

In his most memorable phrase, he challenged those who called him anti-American: “I say, don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”

Gitlin noted that part of Oglesby’s appeal was his own story, one millions of people could relate to. He wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer or angry rich kid. He grew up working class, from the Midwest, in Akron, Ohio, and had far more experience than his fellow activists. He had given up a safe, comfortable life, much to his father’s anger, to try to change the world.

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Activist and fellow SDS leader Tom Hayden called Oglesby a “radical individualist” in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau. He remembered Oglesby as a “brainy,” self-taught man whose research into the Cold War and national security had convinced him that Communism was not the enemy and that change in the United States would have to reach far beyond getting out of Vietnam.

“He used to think you could argue with Pentagon intellectuals like [Defense Secretary] Robert McNamara and get them to change their minds,” Hayden told The Associated Press.

But the ’60s proved an unfulfilled dream from which he never recovered, Gitlin says. By the end of the decade, King and Robert F. Kennedy had been killed, the Vietnam War was still on and Oglesby was being thrown out of the organization he helped grow. Violent activists such as the Weathermen dismissed Oglesby as a “hopeless bourgeois liberal.” Oglesby labeled the Weathermen’s politics as “road rage and comic book Marxism.”

“He suffered greatly from that, maybe more than anyone else of the older crown, from being targeted by the Weathermen as a bad guy,” Gitlin said. “He used to say that the Weathermen were like the children of his generation, dismantling what had been achieved.”

In recent years, Oglesby became obsessed with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He wrote the books “Who Killed JFK?” and “The JFK Assassination” and contributed an afterword to Jim Garrison’s “On the Trail of the Assassins.” In 2008, his memoir “Ravens in the Storm” was published. He also was featured in the 1991 television documentary “Making Sense of the Sixties,” which he didn’t know how to do.

“We had an experience, which I suppose is unique in American history and which nobody who ever went through it will ever forget, an experience filled with treasured moments and nightmares alike,” he said during the documentary. “The ’60s will never level out. It’s a corkscrew. It’s a tailspin. It’s a joy ride on a rollercoaster. It’s a never-ending mystery.”